Flappy Bird

The Rise And Fall Of 2014's Most Addictive Game (According To Its Creator)

Earlier this year, whether you were in line at the supermarket, in a subway car or stuck in traffic, roughly 75% of everyone you saw had their eyes fixated on an app-ready device of some sort. And this omnipresent zombie-like iTrance was due to two ridiculous words.

Flappy. Bird.

Yes, Flappy Bird. Once the mobile gaming world discovered this incredibly entertaining time-waster, it went viral. The world was collectively captivated. It dominated the lives of all who chose to download it, no doubt causing our nation's productivity level to plummet.

The premise is mind-numbingly easy. By vigorously tapping your screen, a user makes a bug-eyed, mentally ill-looking virtual bird flap his wings, thus flying between two Super Mario-esque pipes. Yes, this is the game that made its creator, 28-year-old Dong Nguyen, a rich, rich man.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Nguyen, a young man from Hanoi, Vietnam, explains his incredible story. Nguyen's an intelligent programmer who, while he came from humble beginnings, earned a stellar internship at Vietnam's only gaming company — Punch Entertainment — at age 20 after placing in a highly regarded programming competition. There, he learned the trade that'd he'd one day ply to grow his bank account to previously unfathomable levels.

But it was almost an accident.

Nguyen created this game for fun — nothing more, nothing less. Dong genuinely didn't expect much. In fact, it didn’t take much. As far as coding goes, he claims Flappy Bird was some of the most rudimentary work he's ever done. And after the game was first released, Flappy flopped. For nearly eight months, there it sat there in the iTunes app store, largely undownloaded and sparingly played.

Then word spread. Fast. Soon, after social media helped the game catch on virally, Nguyen's world exploded. Within weeks, he was netting roughly $50,000 daily. Yes, five figures a day. A kid from Vietnam who recalls once not being able to afford a Gameboy was pulling in figures in the neighborhood of a quarter million a week.

Then, as fast as he earned the money, Nguyen decided to pull the plug on its source. Dong yanked Flappy Bird from iTunes and the Google Play Store, rendering it impossible for anyone to download the game again. Nguyen revealed that its popularity sent his life into a tailspin. Local media and paparazzi relentlessly swarmed him and his family, a feeling he calls "suffocating." In fact, after the game blew up, Dong tweeted, "Please give me peace."

It's wild to think that a notoriously hard mobile game involving a bird could bring so much stress to a young man's life, but that's exactly what happened.

While the original Flappy Bird can no longer be downloaded, Nguyen's still busy doing what he loves –- designing games. In fact, he's currently working on several new projects. Will one be the next Flappy Bird? Time will tell. But the success of this brilliant Vietnamese programmer tells us two distinct things: 1. Working at what you love genuinely does have the ability to pay off in spades. And 2. It's nearly impossible to predict what the next big thing is going to be. On paper, does a game about a dopey bird flying past a pipe sound like a get-rich-quick scheme? Few would argue that it does.